What Will NASA's Next Mars Rover Do?

NASA’s next Mars rover will have advanced cameras for making Martian movies, a “rainbow laser” for studying the chemical composition of rocks and the ability to search directly for signs of life, among other groundbreaking technology, the agency announced yesterday. The rover is scheduled to launch in 2020.

The Mars 2020 rover, which is still awaiting an official name, will essentially be a copy of Curiosity, according to Wired. This allows NASA to save time in designing and building the rover and to use duplicate parts created for Curiosity. But it will carry seven new science instruments intended to build upon the discoveries Curiosity and the other Mars missions have made.

Curiosity’s cameras have sent back some amazing images of the planet, but the Mars 2020 rover will have an upgraded camera system, called Mastcam-Z, that will also have the ability to zoom. The team back on Earth will be able to create movies from the rover’s images, the Los Angeles Times reports, a first for Mars technology.

“You’re going to feel like you’re on Mars,” John Grunsfeld, head of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, told the LA Times. “It’s going to be fantastic.”

Also potentially fantastic is the Mars Oxygen ISRU Experiment (MOXIE), a new technology that’s designed to explore the process of creating oxygen from the carbon dioxide in Mars’ atmosphere. The Martian atmosphere is about 100 times thinner than Earth’s, but is packed with carbon dioxide. Being able to convert a natural resource on the planet to something humans can use is a step toward NASA’s stated ultimate goal of landing humans on Mars.

"Mars has resources needed to help sustain life, which can reduce the amount of supplies that human missions will need to carry,” William Gerstenmaier, an associate administrator at NASA, said in a release. “Testing ways to extract these resources and understand the environment will help make the pioneering of Mars feasible."

The new rover is also taking a step toward another long-awaited Mars goal: bringing a sample of the red planet back to Earth. Scientists have long wanted a piece of Mars they could study themselves, without the complications of working with a robot millions of miles away. The Mars 2020 rover will gather and store samples that a future mission could pick up and bring home, according to the LA Times.

“How do we find bio-signatures? That’s not so easy. It’s difficult here on this planet,” Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, told the LA Times. “And we know a lot more about it than we do Mars.”

The agency received 58 proposals for instruments for the rover to carry, according to the release, which is twice the amount NASA has received for other recent missions.